February AOTM #2: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You by Big Thief

Album of the Month: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You - Big Thief

Since it isn't my main genre, folk typically thrives for me when it can present some kind of lyrical, tonal, meta-textual, or textural novelty which makes up for the necessarily simplistic instrumentation and song-form. Most often you see this idea manifest in those lyrical, tonal, and meta-textual components: album's which have garnered notoriety for the artists' personal take on life and the world, or for the story-telling found within their lyrics, or even the story-telling surrounding the album itself. But often times projects like Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or the self-titled Purple Mountains sort of wash over me without much sticking. I'm not a lyrically inclined person, I have a difficult time following them and so I often don't even try. This leads to a weird relationship with folk music (and punk and hip-hop for that matter) whose lyrics are often so integral to what makes an album special.

I bring all of this up to explain exactly what Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You does differently, that even other Big Thief albums don't match. I've enjoyed my fair share of Masterpiece and Capacity, but they have a fraction of the variety and eclecticism of the band's 2022 offering. Despite its massive length at 80 minutes and 20 tracks, Dragon remains compelling due to all the little intricacies in its performances and style: the joyous springs on "Spud Infinity", the ethereal atmosphere of the title track, the droning guitar on "Sparrow", or the warm swagger of "Love Love Love" devolving into harshness and raw emotion.

Ignoring the lyrical elements also puts a premium on utterly unique voices for me, from the gravel of Tom Waits and Mark Lanegan, to the inimitable falsetto of Jeremy Earl of Woods, to the androgynous, almost operatic warble of Jim Ghedi. And in this respect Big Thief have always excelled. Adrianne Lenker has a truly excellent voice, something soft and yet somehow all-consuming. She's adaptive, capable of rolling with the punches as the band swing from soft folk balladry to swirling psychedelic tracks and experiments in electronica.

I don't know whether to complement her or the band at large for how well suited her vocals are to each song, matching their energy and complementing one-another. On "Flower of Blood" her breathy vocals carry overtop the psych-rock instrumentation without competing for space, but on more alt-country oriented songs like the opener "Change" she burrows in and delivers deeper, more focused verses that showcase the depth of character in her voice. Maybe the best track on the album demonstrates this beautifully as well. "Simulation Swarm" develops strongly across its 4 minute runtime, growing slowly before breaking into sudden swells. And Lenker matches this with rhythmic and fast-moving singing that accompanies the instrumentation through every change, her voice subtly breaking when the instrumentals roar out.

Another boon to the albums' length is its immense atmosphere, thick and effortlessly guided by the balance between a sinister track like "Blurred View", complacent and naturalistic pieces like "Certainty", and weird, off-kilter tracks like "Spud Infinity" or "Simulation Swarm" which make up much of the album. This atmosphere is aided by the rich production which manages to effectively bridge the wide swath of tones and styles the album dabbles in. Now, this record never quite reaches the experimental ambiance of something like Grouper's Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill or The Dance of the Moon and the Sun by Natural Snow Buildings, but it accomplishes much the same thing that I love about those albums: providing a sort of broader texture which each track can act as a variation on rather than each starting from the ground up as it were, it justifies the album as a distinct artistic statement.

It's also true that not every experiment that this album attempts will work for you. "Spud Infinity" is oft-maligned by some, but it is just my kind of goofy. I do think the attempts at electronica work much better on "Heavy Bend" than they do on "Wake Me up to Drive" due to its brevity and Lenker's bright vocals. The latter gets stuck in a bit of a rut and never really develops satisfyingly. "Blue Lightning" also makes for a relatively weak closing track, playing heavily with the country elements which pop up across some other tracks.

With an album this long and this varied I could keep going on for a while, but I think this is an album which speaks for itself. With all of its flip-flopping between melancholic introspection and vibrant liveliness it's an incredibly malleable listening experience. With parts of the second half delving more into the nocturnal side of things it's a record that pairs well with your morning coffee and the delirium of a late night.

-Paul Taylor

(Assistant News Director at WXOU)